


Rationalizing the Denominator

by shara



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 09:27:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4474049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shara/pseuds/shara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"She's messing up my variables," he tells Wilson, shielding his face from the sun.</em> Takes place after the finale, and everyone talks in math.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rationalizing the Denominator

  
House sketches out the proof after getting back to his room from his session. He’s been here two weeks and they’ve alternately tried to diagnose him with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.

“Proof by contradiction,” he snarls at her. “I am a genius. They think I’m an idiot. Therefore they’re the idiots.”

Amber laughs her light, giggly laugh, shaking her head. “Your initial assumption is false,” she says, smiling, and House sits down on the bed, suddenly feeling tired. “You’re not rational.”

“Q. E. D.,” she adds, standing up from her perch on the desk and indicating herself with a flourish.

She steps lightly towards him and House wonders what it means when his own subconscious is laughing at him. He can’t help himself from touching her when she presses her knee into the mattress beside him, sliding his hands up her silk-smooth legs, the fabric of her cotton skirt against his skin. She pulls him close with an arm around his neck and he doesn’t think about faulty logic, doesn’t want to think about why he’s kissing her.

 _Be Cuddy_ , he whispers to her and she obliges, her blond hair turning dark, mischievous smile becoming indulgent, kind. She feels achingly familiar in his arms; he can even smell the subtle hint of perfume she uses; he remembers the feel of her hair brushing against his cheek. But her eyes stare lovingly into his and he pulls his hands away, stares up at her, horrified.

_No—no—_

She blurs at the edges and becomes Wilson, curving over him like a logarithm, eyes bright in the dark, a tantalizing glimpse of skin visible past his loosened collar. He wants to trace his fingers along that skin, wants to _feel_ —again. He covers his eyes instead with the heels of his palms and sees fractals blossom at the corners of his eyelids.

_Stop it. Stop it._

*

When Wilson walks across the visiting room toward him, the tiles under his feet fracture into triangles, pentagons, curved edged polygons. He wants to imagine the floor collapsing under Wilson’s footsteps, but he knows it’s impossible; the disparate shapes meld into squares again once Wilson passes and he knows it’s only an illusion of change, of discovery. He still can’t keep his eyes off the slope of his cheekbones though, the angles his elbows make with the table, the triangular knot of his tie.

“What?” Wilson asks, noticing him looking.

“Nothing,” House says, staring at the faint upward curve of his mouth.

*

He doesn’t know what to do with her. She’s a negative under his radical, and he needs a whole new set of axes to contain her.

“She’s messing up my variables,” he tells Wilson, shielding his face from the sun. If he does this, then all he can see is sky, with the grass soft and comfortable under him. Wilson looks out of place with his tie trying to escape over his shoulder, hands around his knees, trying to preserve his clothes from grass stains.

“Can’t you…factor her out or something?” Wilson asks.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Amber says with him, and they both frown over at Wilson.

“He’s an idiot,” she says, tossing her hair in the sunlight.

“No, he’s not,” he says, and now he turns to frown at her.

“Who?” Wilson asks, looking from him to the empty space to House’s left, and House can almost feel Amber rolling her eyes.

 _See?_ she’s saying.

“I’m not a composite,” House says, ignoring her. “I have nothing to factor out.” All he sees in front of him is an infinity of primes.

Amber twirls an imaginary pill around and around her imaginary fingers. “Forever is a long time,” she says.

*

The walls, the bedsheets are all white, and House wants to sink into their coolness, bleed away the heat from his brain. But they burn hot when he touches them, and House sweats profusely for days, waking up soaked, screaming multidimensional polygons into the electric air.

*

“How are you feeling, Greg?”  
_  
Fine._

_Great._

_Like sunshine._

_Fucking fantastic._

“Better,” he says, nodding to the tessellation in the carpet, imagining the pieces interlocking together in new pattern. He feels less like he’s going to scream every time he opens his mouth, that’s a start. But he can barely keep the question folded up in the corner of his mouth. He touches it constantly with his tongue, like a bad tooth, soon it will tumble out of him. He still—  
_wantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswantswants_ just needs one pill and he can  
coast on to infinity, float along the curve of a new steady state function—

“Focus, Greg.”

And he swears one of these days he’s going to take that silver monogrammed pen from the desk and stab him in the neck with it, stand over him and ask, _And how are you feeling, Doct—_

He stops with a jerk because that’s Amber—Amber says things like that but he looks around him and no, it’s all him, she’s nowhere to be found, the silence in his mind is deafening.

*

“You look better,” says Wilson, smiling.

It took him a while to stop throwing up this morning, the jagged polynomials erupting from him, burning their way up his throat with their irrational coefficients, a never-ending line of decimals. He looks at the pile of things Wilson brought with him, his ipod and back issues of medical journals. There’s a weird feeling in his throat and he looks away from Wilson’s gaze, swallows, and wonders if some things remain constant while other variables fluctuate around them.

“My voltage has been displaced,” he says finally, feeling his hand begin to shake.

Wilson nods. “You’ll probably have to make some adjustments to get back to equilibrium,” he says, like it’s nothing. But Wilson doesn’t get it; his board has been fried, the circuit components burned through, neural pathways turned to ash.

He draws a sine wave on the napkin between them. He can’t stop oscillating, sweatingshiveringvomitingstarving the function keeps going, there is no convergence, he will never reach equilibrium.

Wilson takes the pen gently from his shaky fingers and draws a pair of axes over the curve to keep it steady. He folds his fingers over House’s and House feels his heart beat out of rhythm.

“You’re going to be fine,” Wilson says, with curvature.

House wants to lean over their plane of existence and kiss the line tangent to his smile, but he can’t move his leg it hurts too much.

  



End file.
